THE alliteratively titled Feminist Fletcher Festival opens in York on Monday with the first of four staged readings of plays by the English Renaissance playwright John Fletcher.

Maggie Smales directs the 7pm reading of Fletcher and Francis Beaumont's The Maid's Tragedy at the Black Swan Inn, Peasholme Green, York, to be followed by a short panel discussion with theatre and feminist scholars that will seek to unravel the connections between Fletcher's time and our own, with a special emphasis on feminism.

In the play, patriarchal values such as family honour are strong on the island of Rhodes, while violence is a tool to control women and preserve gendered oppression, but how can women fight back?

Hence the feminist focus of a festival co-produced by Lauren Cowling, Ben Prusiner and Aurelia Puigdomènech. Further details of the festival can be found in a March 27 article on The Press website, but let's learn more from the producers.

Ben is a freelance theatre director who has swapped New York for York and is directing The Martial Maid, or Love's Cure for a May 7 reading; Lauren and Aurelia are both studying at the University of York's Centre for Women's Studies. Lauren, from Dorset, is doing a PhD in The Social Meanings of Vagina; likewise Aurelia, from Catalonia, a PhD in Contemporary Secular Images of the Virgin Mary.

"There's an enormous number of Fletcher plays that refer to women in the title, especially by comparison with Shakespeare," says Ben. "So the original idea for the festival was inspired by York Shakespeare Project's upcoming production of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen (May 2 to 5). I'd directed Henry VIII for YSP, the other Shakespeare/Fletcher play, and I'd done a lot reading on Fletcher that saw him as a proto-feminist, which impressed me, especially in a male playwright.

"I felt it required further investigation with a variety of perspectives, and I asked Lauren if it was a subject she'd be interested in exploring. Lauren then said, 'you really should talk to Aurelia as well as she's studying art and has a theatre background'. That's how it all started."

Lauren will be moderating the panel discussions, recruiting panellists from women's studies and theatre departments. "Predominantly they'll be from the University of York but there'll also be scholars from outside, from London and elsewhere, especially because John Fletcher is such a specialist subject," she says.

"I'll be more of a facilitator than a controller of the panels and I'll be very interested to learn what directors and casts have to say about creating each piece, while looking at it through the gender lens of the modern age."

Aurelia adds: "That's what's going to be fascinating: not just bringing the plays alive with a 21st century perspective but looking at Fletcher as a feminist and how we look at that historically and now."